# The New Stablecoin Order: Reconstructing Dollar Hegemony Behind an Iron Curtain  

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**Published on:** 2025-07-25
**Categories:** stablecoin
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@translate/the-new-stablecoin-order-reconstructing-dollar-hegemony-behind-an-iron-curtain

## Content

An Iron Curtain Falls Across the Global South From the under-the-table trades of Asia, Africa and Latin America to the Indian diaspora on the Arabian Sea, a new Iron Curtain has descended across the continents of the Global South. Yiwu is only a bullet-train ride from Hangzhou, and what flows between them is not just bottled water but stablecoins. Behind the Curtain: The Fortresses of Traditional Finance Behind this curtain sit all the citadels of banking and fintech—Bank of America, the two Morgans, non-bank lenders, Wall Street, K-Street, China’s Big-Four state banks, Washington and Silicon Valley. Every one of these famous redoubts and every river of capital now lies within the realm of TradFi, and every one of them—whether they admit it or not—has fallen under the influence, if not outright control, of USDT and Justin Sun. --- Tether’s Unfocused Grand Strategy Messari’s 2025 stablecoin report—equal parts research and paid advertising—reads like the opening keynote of the Stablecoin Wars. Payment coins, cross-border settlement, peer-to-peer remittances: all are being built on the USDT-Tron axis, with only USDC and Circle’s CPN putting up a fight. Yet Tether’s kingdom is brittle. Tron is a single-point empire; Tether’s attention flits like a moth. In front of it, USDC “rebates” Coinbase and Binance to swallow market share; behind it, Ethena bribes exchanges with “vote-buying” to harvest delta-neutral yields. --- From Petrodollar to Stablecoin Dollar After Tether booked a 2024 net profit of US $14 billion—out-earning BlackRock—the industry shook off the UST trauma and forced itself back onto every treasury’s whiteboard. The GENIUS Act, which will soon ring-fence stablecoin issuers, is not about consumer protection; it is about recognizing that a single private firm now underwrites more U.S. Treasuries than Germany. The old petrodollar was backed by aircraft carriers. The new stablecoin dollar is backed by three-month bills—and by the willingness of the Global South to hold them. --- Tether’s Distracted Love Affair with Bitcoin But Tether is not here to fight Washington or to make peace with it. Tether is here to mine Bitcoin, publish password managers, light up solar nodes in Africa, sneak into institutional settlement through Plasma—and, like Twitter co-founder Jack, to make Bitcoin bigger and stronger. On 29 June CEO Paolo Ardoino open-sourced Pears, a free password manager. It does nothing for Tether’s bottom line, yet you can almost hear them say: “We do it for love.” --- “She’s Different” – Tether and Bitcoin These are expensive hobbies for the ultra-rich, but Tether’s scatter-shot investments do have a spine: the Bitcoin ecosystem and its payment rails. The former is a long-term bet on BTC as pristine collateral; the latter is an everyday escape hatch from Justin Sun. Sun and Tether are frenemies: Sun chases TUSD, USDD and FDUSD to reduce his USDT dependence, while Tether keeps auditioning new chains. Yet fate handcuffs them together. Bitcoin is the true love; Sun is the accident they cannot leave. --- Orthodoxy Wars: Scarface vs. Hyena Alliance Every empire dies from civil war, and Tether’s coalition is no exception. Plasma or Stablechain—which will inherit the throne? Right now Plasma wears the crown, but the relationship between USDT and USDT0 is murky; USDT0 feels like a side quest that could still become the main storyline. The succession drama will be binge-worthy. --- The External Front: Circle’s March Toward Compliance Outside the palace walls, USDC marches toward full compliance. The GENIUS Act spells out the rules, and Circle has already plugged into SWIFT via ISO 20022 and bridged chains through CCTP. On-chain, off-chain—Circle swallows both. --- Scarface and the Hyenas: USDG’s Coalition If Circle is Scarface—scarred but regal—then USDG is the hyena pack. Issued by Paxos (BUSD’s former midwife), USDG is paired with the Global Dollar Network (GDN). The alliance spans Kraken, Bullish (the EOS spin-off sitting on 164 k BTC), Galaxy Digital and the broker-dealer of the moment, Robinhood. Four camps now square off: • USDT: Binance–Tron–Tether–Bitfinex • USDC: Coinbase–Circle–Binance • USDG: Paxos–Bullish–Galaxy–Kraken–Robinhood • USDe: Ethena–Arthur Hayes–Bybit They cover payments, settlement, and unit of account—yet the fuel that keeps them running is not elegant code but good old-fashioned bribery. --- The Economics of Bribes The playbook was drafted in the Curve Wars, refined by Pendle’s LST/LRT epoch, and perfected by Lido: aggregate retail capital, eliminate the fixed cost of running your own validator, and skim fees. USDC simply splits 60 % of its revenue with Coinbase and Binance; in exchange it survived the SVB bank-run at US $0.87 without losing its closest partners. Ethena’s USDe has signed every CEX that matters—Binance, OKX, Bybit, Deribit, Gemini, MEXC—handing them ENA tokens in return for liquidity and delta-neutral yield. Now even USDG promises 97 % of seigniorage to ecosystem partners—profit be damned if it can still grab bronze in a USDT/USDC duopoly. --- A Hairline Crack in the USDT Bloc In the race for institutional settlement USDT is falling behind. USDC is already in the front parlor with regulators, while Ethena is co-launching USDtb with BlackRock and building Converge, an institutional chain, with Securitize. USDG copies the model, vowing to hand nearly all profits to its allies. Food-delivery color wars gave us Meituan-yellow, Ele.me-blue, and the snowballing profit machine that is Mixue Ice-Cream. Who will be Mixue in the stablecoin wars—and who will be left bleeding on the floor? --- Epilogue: Don’t Let the Water Run Dry The Great Stablecoin War began in 2014 with USDT’s first mint; we are now in its eleventh year. Offshore-CNY stablecoins appeared almost as early and once matched USDT in volume—Huobi once quoted pairs directly in renminbi, the way Kraken now quotes in USD. Let us hope the market ends the monopoly this time, so we do not hand over Bitcoin’s hash-price to a single actor again. Water that flows away can still return; money that leaves may never come back.

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